Paper Title
Impact of Residential Building Towers on The Ambient Air in Periurban Areas of Chandigarh, U.T., India

Abstract
Constructing high rise buildings is a kind of fashion in modern architecture. The developed nations are competing with each other in elevating the height of residential, commercial or mixed use buildings to show their sign of prosperity, prestige, progress, modernity, attract tourism, enhancing economic growth etc. The varied interests, worldwide, are being watched at the cost of environment, human health and natural resources. But for the developing country like India, the need of such tall structures is to accommodate swelling population in a limited space. Most of the urban areas have already reached their saturation capacity; rural areas are not preferred abodes for the today’s generation leading to elevated urbanization pressure to periurban areas. The City Beautiful, Chandigarh, one of the most planned cities of India, a future “Smart City” has a limited geographical area of only 114 sq Km. The residential pressure on the city, due to its growing population, makes its periurban areas to flourish and its being witnessed by mushrooming of unlimited multi-storied or high rise residential towers which are putting an adverse impact on the air quality in and around these buildings. The air quality around these buildings has been found to have much higher particulate matter (PM-10, PM 2.5.µm) than the permissible limits by WHO. Temperature, relative humidity along with CO2 levels has also been found showing deviation from normal climatic range. The present study has witnessed the deteriorating air quality in and around such buildings and has proposed some corrective measures to be taken into account while raising such structures along with some proposal to the residents to make these as healthy abodes.
Keywords- Particulate matter, microclimate, vertical towns, periurban, air corridors, high rise buildings, towers